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Redmine project management

Overview

Redmine is a powerful project management system. It is similar to the popular Trac, however it looks much more professional and is certainly easier to navigate.

Problem

There are no Ubuntu (nor Debian) packages of Redmine available, though some are in progress. Additionally as Redmine uses a Ruby on Rails framework, there are additional complexities ensuring that the Rails framework is current.

Howto

Rails setup

You need to be running rails v2.1.2 or later. As we were installing on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, we used packages from Debian unstable:

Tweaks

Add favicon

Redmine ships an empty favicon.ico file in /usr/share/redmine/public which you can alter if redmine is the root application (i.e. on http://example.com). Otherwise:

edit /usr/share/redmine/app/views/layouts/base.rhtml and add to the end of the meta lines:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />

Follow up

If you create an issue without an assignee, you may find that no-one is notified. The only way around this at the moment is to ensure that someone watches each project. They can do this by selecting "My account" and setting "Email notifications" to "For any event on all my projects".

Redmine's permissions and workflow are currently very primitive compared to something like JIRA. We can't wait for them to catch up and surpass it.

Passenger

To gain a useful speedup and reduction in memory, you can migrate to using mod_passenger. Most of the documentation and packages are supplied by the kind folks at BrightBox.

There are a few extra items due to running redmine under a subdirectory.

ln -sf /usr/share/redmine/public $DOCUMENT_ROOT/redmine

edit /usr/share/redmine/config/environment.rb directly (not sure why the SetEnv and DefaultInitEnv in apache do not work)